Transcriber: Ethan Norris Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Well, now, as you’ve heard, I am a journalist,
and I say that today with some pride.
I haven't always been proud of my profession.
When there were all those cases of hacking journalists,
hacking into people's private voicemail,
or when Princess Diana was hunted to her death
by paparazzi.
I didn’t admit to being a journalist too often.
But with what is happening in the world today,
we depend on those fearless, committed reporters
who are risking their own lives to tell us what they perceive to be the truth.
Is it the truth or is it fake news?
Because right now, it’s not just a physical war,
a tragic war leading to death, leading to torture, leading to invasion...
- you can tell which side I’m on, can’t you ? -
(Laughter)
But it’s also an information war.
Fake news. You may be wondering who invented the phrase,
and you won’t be surprised to learn who claims to have invented the phrase.
Indeed.
President Trump. He was not the president during his election campaign.
He said, “I invented the term and I’m rather proud of it.”
Conveniently ignoring the fact
that Hillary Clinton used it two months previously
and it’s first use in print was in 1890, in a newspaper headline.
And perhaps one of the most notorious proponents of fake news
was newspaper owner Randolph Hearst,
who sent one of his artists to Cuba
to report on the war and send pictures back.
And the artist sent him a message saying,
“Please, can I come home? It’s all quiet here,
there’s nothing happening.”
And Randolph Hearst replied,
“You supply the pictures, I supply the war.”
And by telling lies, he managed to inflame the American public so much
that he created a pointless Spanish-American War.
How can we tell the difference between propaganda, lies, fake news
and accurate, factually-based truth?
Let’s have a look at a picture.
What do you actually see there?
Some of you might remember,
Susan Lawley was reading the news one evening
when there was a slight scuffle in the studio.
And what we couldn’t see was that there was a protest
by some women who had tried to break into and interrupt the news bulletin
and were being sat on by Nicholas Witchell.
And it's always been a sadness in me that the cameras didn't turn around
and show us that - Sue kept going.
So this could be just a pointless bit of protest
by a lady who wanted to draw attention to herself.
Could be, couldn’t it?
Or it could be the act of an extraordinary half Ukrainian,
half Russian woman journalist whose placard reads:
“No war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you.”
She has been fined for doing that and her son says he won’t forgive her
for destroying the family life.
But the fact is that the vast majority of the viewers to state television
on which this happened will not believe her.
They believe what they’re being told
and what they’re being told, as you know,
is there isn’t a war, there isn’t an invasion,
there’s a special military operation to try and clear out
the neo-Nazis who are dominating Ukraine who really want to be part of Russia.
Why do they believe that?
There is a syndrome called confirmation bias
and we’re all prone to it.
We believe what we want to believe.
We want to believe that our leaders have integrity, are telling us the truth.
It takes quite a lot of jumping up and down and providing other evidence
for us to disbelieve our leaders.
And that’s what’s happening in Russia.
They’ve been told for years that Ukraine should be part of Russia,
is part of Russia, and that therefore what is happening is liberation.
This gentleman is quite distinguished.
He’s the Russian ambassador to Ireland and he was interviewed on Irish television
about the fact that troops are massing on the border with Ukraine.
And he was asked whether this meant there was going to be an invasion.
“Absolutely not.” he said,
“There would be no military point in it.
There would be no economic point in it.
There would be no political point in it. It is an insane idea.”
He said that on February the 15th.
On February the 24th,
Russia invaded Ukraine.
Does he believe what he was saying or was it a deliberate lie?
Our ambassadors are always trained and paid to lie
on behalf of their government.
Well, I don’t know.
(Laughter)
Can you tell? I can’t tell.
But there is something called the big lie.
Now this actually was written about by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
And I need to quote him accurately. He said:
“If you want to persuade the crowd, the public, a nation,
to believe and follow you,
you have to tell the big lie”,
not just a little lie,
a big one, because he said: “it would never come into their heads
to fabricate colossal untruths
and they would not believe others could have the impudence
to distort the truth so infamously.”
Ok, so what happens when, like the poor old ambassador
in nine days,
he’s proved to have told a complete lie?
It doesn’t matter.
Even though he says facts which prove this to be a lie,
may be brought clearly to their minds,
they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think
there may be some other explanation,
for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it,
even after it has been nailed down,
a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world
and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
And of course, Hitler’s big lie was directed at his favorite scapegoat,
the Jews, and it led, as we know, to persecution,
extermination, the Holocaust.
But, I mean, there have been other victims of the big lie.
In the Middle Ages, old women
- speaking as an old woman -
were obvious victims of the myth of witchcraft.
They were blamed for any harvest that failed, they were blamed for
spreading plagues, they were ducked, they were drowned, they were burned,
they were crushed to death.
Are we immune, in our day and age from the big lie?
Well,
People have tried.
People tried to break through.
This also happened in Russia.
This happened in a little local television station.
And what they were trying to do was use sarcasm and satire
to break through the big lie.
Because here’s another clue for you:
if draconian laws are brought in,
which means that if you say anything the government doesn’t approve of,
you go to jail,
somebody is lying to you.
That is the law that they brought in in Russia.
People who attempted to talk about an invasion, to protest about an invasion,
stood to be tried, convicted and sent to jail for up to 15 years.
So this little local television program in Russia decided to try and use satire,
try and use sarcasm.
And what this says is
it’s laid out like the signs you get beside roadworks,
and what it says is: “move along, nothing to see here,
there’s no crisis, the ruble is riding high.
There’s no economic collapse. Everything’s fine.”
Well, they were closed down.
Am I wrong just to blame Russi for the big lie or Hitler for the big lie?
Well, he’s talked a lot about the big lie: now to Trump.
The big lie is Joe Biden’s big li of claiming to have won the election.
To you and me, perhaps it’s the other way around.
To you and me, the big lie is his claim
that the election was completely fraudulent.
Okay.
Just before, at his famous rally,
when the groups of supporter went off to storm on
and break into Capitol Hill,
he said to them: “We didn’t just win the election, we won by a landslide.”
And so after the election, there was a series of lawsuits of investigations,
people specifically trying to find out whether indeed there had been fraud.
And although they discovered a few flaws here and there,
there was absolutely nothing
that could lead anyone rationally to believe
that Joe Biden did not win the election, of course he did!
There’s been a recent poll
of the Republican Party.
Guess how many believed
that Joe Biden definitely won fraudulently?
46% .
And another 25% believe that he probably won fraudulently.
So you see, when Hitler says that a big lie leaves traces behind it,
even when the evidence, the factual evidence proves that is completely false,
it remains engraved on people's minds.
Now I’m going to say something which I hope will not offend you.
But one of the concerns I have,
in the way our minds are trained, is faith.
What is faith?
Faith is believing without evidence.
Faith is trusting.
Shutting your eyes and trusting.
Whatever anyone else may say,
you believe it because you have faith.
And that does worry me
because I think it trains us to shut off
that bit of our brain we need so badly,
which is the logical bit.
Take COVID, for example.
You know, and I know that all the scientists, every evening,
all the medical experts, stood up over and over again
and said to us
“Test. Keep testing. Keep testing,
and vaccinate. Vaccinate, vaccinate.”
Did they convince everyone?
We know they didn’t.
We know that there are people,
some of them fit young people,
who embrace the theory that vaccination had serious side effects,
perhaps worse than the virus, and refused to be vaccinated.
And we know some of them died.
Needlessly, pointlessly.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
Why, as human beings, are we so vulnerable to the big lie,
the lie that's repeated over again, the lie we have faith in?
Why is that?
Well.
Let me quote to you from another author.
Actually, unlike Hitler,
I have the highest regard for this one.
His name is Yuval Noah Harari.
You may know him from his international bestseller, which was called Sapiens.
You read that?
There’s a very interesting passage in Sapiens in which he says that
the reason Sapiens won in the end over the Neanderthals
is that the Neanderthals, also hominids,
could only persuade those around them,
that is their family or their immediate pack,
to help them, support them, and follow them.
Whereas Sapiens have this amazing skill
of believing in something they couldn’t see,
like
patriotism,
nationalism.
or an abstract like.
Britannia,
Arsenal Football Club.
And what it meant was
that you could unite not just 20 or 40 or 50,
but millions of people.
Okay.
Well, Harari picks up this theme in his most recent book,
which is 21 Lessons for the 21st Century,
in which he describes in detail the way that Putin
would defend and explain his invasion of Ukraine.
And he wrote this well before it actually happened.
And he says, “Homo sapiens is a post-truth species
whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.
Indeed,” he says, “Homo sapiens conquered this planet, thanks, above all,
to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.
We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers
because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around,
and convince millions of others to believe in them.
As long as everybody believes in the same fictions,
we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.
So, according to Harari,
as human beings, it’s our strength.
We can create a fiction
and we can unite behind it.
Is it our strength?
Do we see that happening in the world today?
The fiction that that maternity hospital in Ukraine was not operational,
that the women being carried out of it on stretchers were actresses,
that the Ukrainians are bombing their own residential flats.
And most recent of all, as I speak to you today,
that the bodies still lying in the streets
have been staged by Ukrainians,
that no Russian army would ever do that.
And who knows what tomorrow discoveries are going to bring
In this information law...information war?
Now,
I’m behaving, are’nt I, as if I can tell the difference
between fact and fiction.
What am I saying? Am I saying that because images exist,
we know what’s true and what’s false?
I never looked like that.
(Laughter)
I say it in some sadness.
It was before the advent of the Photoshop, you know.
This was just retouching.
But in fact, it’s telling a lie.
So we must not always believe everything we see or hear.
There is one organization I commend to you that we can trust.
A small group of staff, an army of volunteers,
work for this organization called Bellingcat,
which is actually scanning videos from all over the world,
checking them out and making sure that the messages get across.
They are the ones actually identified those two salesmen
who laughed about going to Salisbury, Russian salesman,
do you remember them, just because they wanted to admire the spire?
It was Bellingcat that identified them as two Russian colonels,
one who'd actually been awarded medals by Putin.
So I do hope, ladies and gentlemen, that by being skeptical,
by having as many sources of information as we can have,
by resisting draconian law,
by making sure that when we trust, it doesn’t blind us to the facts,
by being aware of organizations like Bellingcat
and making sure their voices are heard,
we might make the ultimate hope that I have,
tha audacity of hope, you could say,
that this gentleman, the Russian ambassador to Ireland,
was telling the truth, that there was no political advantage,
there was no economic advantage, there was no military advantage.
It was an invasion that was an insane idea.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)